THE BACK PAGE AND THE WINNER. IS I. . . . 't"\h f/ , tit( . ''] can smell my own fear. " F or this year's cartoon-caption contest, we challenged our readers to make their own cartoon. More specifically; we challenged them to make their own Charles Barsotti cartoon. Barsotti drew the basic setup-a therapist taking notes next to an empty couch-and then supplied characters who ranged from the conventional (man, woman) to the unconventional (squirrel, superhero), from the surreal (dragon, screwdriver) to favorites from the Barsotti ceuvre (king, dog). The task for readers was more difficult than in past years, but they responded with the same enthusiasm. In fact, something about the process of cutting, pasting, and designing an original piece of humorous artvvork inspired the amateur cartoonists to new heights. Call it group therapy: According to the contest's rules, the characters could be cut out and placed on the couch.l\IIost readers went for a single-character setup, proposing self-hating dragons, sexually confused kings, and Oedipally conflicted dogs. Other readers left the couch blank, stacked all eight characters on top of one another, or performed cosmetic surgery (the squirrel, wearing the superhero's cape, became a flying squirrel; the woman, her hair painted with Wite-Out, 96 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 26, 2004 became Barbara Bush). The squirrel was the least popular character; the most popular was the screwdriver, who was the source of numerous jokes about sex (captions too obvious to print), alcohol ("I don't even like vodka"), and general malaise ("I just don't know which way to turn"). More than a few readers mistook the screwdriver for a parking meter, and a couple even thought it was a guitar. In the end, though, the best cartoons were those which combined this spirit of experimentation with the original mission of the contest: to create a genuine ersatz Barsotti cartoon, complete with psychological depth and poignant wit. In one of the entries that we selected as finalists, the superhero muses about his place in the world: "Sometimes I think everybody'd be better off if I was a bird or a plane" (Kip Conlon, of Brooklyn). In another, the king complains to the therapist, "Mom always liked you best" (June Anderson and Dr. Alice McKay; of Henderson, Nevada). And in yet another the therapist imagines the dragon mounted like a hunting trophy on the wall (Dorothy Peca, of El Paso, Texas). The winning entry (above) was created by Danial Adkison, of Brooklyn, and he will receive a version of his cartoon drawn by Charles Barsotti.